Update: The DOJ’s press release can be found here and the indictment can be found here. Ellen Nakashima reports: The Justice Department is set to announce Wednesday the indictments of two Russian spies and two criminal hackers in connection with the heist of 500 million Yahoo user accounts in 2014, marking the first U.S. criminal cyber…
Category: Of Note
US military leak exposes ‘holy grail’ of security clearance files
Zack Whittaker reports: A unsecured backup drive has exposed thousands of US Air Force documents, including highly sensitive personnel files on senior and high-ranking officers. Security researchers found that the gigabytes of files were accessible to anyone because the internet-connected backup drive was not password protected. The files, reviewed by ZDNet, contained a range of…
Home Depot to Pay Banks $25 Million in Data Breach Settlement
Jeff John Roberts reports: Home Depot has taken another step to move on from its colossal 2014 data breach, which involved hackers stealing email or credit card information from more than 50 million customers by infiltrating self check-out terminals. In a new settlement with dozens of banks, the retailer has agreed to pay $25 million for damages they incurred…
Law Firm Sued for Alleged Lax Data Security Avoids Class Action
Derek Borchardt and Michael F. Buchanan have an update on litigation previously noted on this site. At its heart, a lawsuit claimed a Chicago law firm, Johnson & Bell, had inadequate data security. There was no allegation of any actual breach – the suit was over inadequate data security. Back in December of last year, we reported that for the…
Dutch detectives unravel 3.6 million encrypted emails sent by criminals
DutchNews.nl reports: Dutch detectives have gained access to 3.6 million encrypted emails sent by criminal gangs which will be used in dozens of prosecutions, the public prosecution department said on Thursday. The information in the mails will provide evidence for criminal cases, including murder, armed robbery, drugs, money laundering and other forms of organised crime,…
Russian Hackers Said to Seek Hush Money From Liberal U.S. Groups
Michael Riley reports: Russian hackers are targeting U.S. progressive groups in a new wave of attacks, scouring the organizations’ emails for embarrassing details and attempting to extract hush money, according to two people familiar with probes being conducted by the FBI and private security firms. At least a dozen groups have faced extortion attempts since…